Morse Code vs. Not - I too learned it at a young age (when I was in college) and passed the exam to get the license, but I honestly don't feel it should be a requirement.
You know what I've seen happen a lot lately? People learning how to do code on their own. Personally I think it was a good idea - get them hooked into the hobby, show them modes they may like - they'll pick up and keep the ones they like (and believe it or not - you don't have to force people to do morse code!) and run with it.
I've honestly seen more people pick up code as a hobby than I ever have in the past.
From what I've read actually a good chunk of messages via amateur radio were passed by hams via Cuba over vhf/uhf, but alas - that wasn't reported anywhere but various ham radio blogs.
Granted, it takes a fairly big antenna and lots of power to bounce signals off the moon. However, there are computer programs [nitehawk.com] that allow for slow text transmission (think really slow modem) via moonbounce, reducing the antenna and power requirements.
As the article says - creating your own experience is really a key. I've done it since I was 15, and in the more active clubs - you have members who are always thinking of new things to build. One year we built a huge balloon (the kind used to float radiosonde devices) with a camera, 2 beacons (so we could locate the balloon), and a repeater - talked all over Oregon state with it all afternoon long.
There really is no limit to what you can do based on your interests in amateur radio.Want to play with satellites? Work skip all day long? Play with computers over the air (with a variety of digital protocols - including 802.11, wimax, and dstar), play with your own tv station, learn morse code, play with faxes (including weather fax from space).
There are even huge world wide games you can play called contests - with somewhat tangible prizes (usually a mention in QST - the trade magazine in the US, or a certificate) - py2el on youtube is one of the more hardcore of these contesters definitely worth checking out his channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/py2el
This feature is in the PDF specification, and in fact in the youtube video you'll notice that the trust manager warning is pretty severe "only do this if you trust the PDF" sort of thing.
To me its akin to downloading an EXE from a website with a browser and clicking the open button...
No-one here feels that the PS3 or XBOX is a threat to computing because (get this): they aren't marketed as computers. The iPad is marketed as a computer. You can even get a word processor, spreadsheet, email, calendar and powerpoint wanna be app for it called iWork.
It is unquestionably testing the waters for a more locked down device that is in fact a general purpose computer. It would not surprise me at all if this year no less - they released a cheap netbook/laptop like device (specifically with a keyboard) running the exact same OS and restrictions.
For some reason Apple keeps coming back to this notion there is serious money to be made in hardware (which explains why none of their devices come with expansion ports, and the prices on said accessories are insanely not-so-great). Google is doing to Apple with the Android OS what Microsoft did to Apple with MS-DOS and Windows - build software that runs on anything, not hardware that only runs one thing, and I for one hope that keeps Steve up at night.
Not to mention Adobe ported Quake 2 to Flash back in 2007 using the Flash C compiler and it was about as fast - considering it was the most hacked together port on earth I thought its performance was ok.
Also - Quake 2 might have run on a really fast 486 (like a 133 mhz one), but yeah it was designed for a low end Pentium with hardware acceleration.
I try the best I can to buy American made products - or failing that products made in countries that have fair treatment of their employees, but I know for a fact you typed that message on a machine that has at least one Chinese component in it.
Even my Pegasos II (which was made in Germany) has some chips on it that were manufactured in China.
Some of the best living standards in the world are in socialist countries - most of Europe in fact;).
The reason why the USSR failed was as you said the command economy, but also the amount of greed and corruption at the top.
The reason why our economy will fail eventually is because its what I call socialized capitalism - or in other words capitalism without risk. The second something bad happens the government will bail out people who by definition should have lost everything. For the simple reason that the rich get richer (even when things are bad) because they simply make people below them suffer. I think capitalism would work great if we actually had it.
Don't believe me? Bankers got bonuses this year - even though they lost money last year (and indeed many banks failed!). Washington Mutuals (which also failed) Alan Fishman who was CEO of the company for three weeks retired with 19 million - guess who paid for that? Consumers - that's who.
Do you like erecting strawmen? Does it make you feel manly when you knock them down?
I'm hardly misrepresenting your position - you don't like Flash because its closed - I'm actually not disagreeing with that position. I think its hypocritical of you to not like Flash because its closed, but support Apple's development decisions - because they are essentially the same as Flash.
The rest of my argument just refutes what you state as fact. I simply showing that you are in fact misinformed about Flash in general - not really a strawman either.
So its ok that Apple close everything down and make it so that you have to have a signed app (drm) to run anything on their phone, but not ok that flash is a closed format?
Also you say "a patented codec" you know Flash supports about 6 different video codecs and 6 different audio formats right?
On CPU time - the only reason it sucks cpu time on the Mac is because Apple doesn't publically document hardware acceleration for video players - essentially to do video on the Mac you have to use their slow Quicktime libs. In fact the only apps that use these secret api's are made by Apple (remember how Microsoft got a lot of flak over them being the only ones using secret tools/api's on Office to give them a competitive edge?). On my windows machine app - run of the mill Flash apps never seem to approach 10% cpu overhead in a worse case scenario. I have a 933 MHz Celeron based umpc that runs Windows XP and plays all flash apps (including hulu) just fine.
The one study that was done on the Nexus One showed that playing video on Flash 10 used about 6% of the battery resources overall.
Like most things the government gets involved when your activities start affecting others, and sadly - especially if you live near civilization, drive a car, own a house, work for a living or get sick - everything you do affects everyone else in one manner or another.
For me its a good way to keep my contact lists up to date. I've gotten people who have looked for me to offer me a job for instance, I've gotten into betas like google voice and star trek online.
More than anything its a whitelisted email service as well. I've never gotten a single spam message in my entire time on face book.
Its also a micro-blog, but you don't have to use that if you don't want to.
One of the big points is that there's no native support for cmyk in GIMP that just makes it plain useless for print-productions.
Not that you need a cmyk work-flow for print production (at least newer systems) - that's what color management is for.
What scary about products like FrameMaker (and any other Windows/Mac app that doesn't support postscript passthrough) - tons of user manuals, textbooks etc etc - its only really capable of outputting in RGB.
A lot of people (mac fans) who think Flash has no future think its only used for video. The reality is its used in a lot of television animation (a lot of tv cartoons from here and Japan use Flash), video game authoring (not just web games either - a lot of stand-alone game ui's are compiled in flash - like Starcraft 2). I know someone who does nothing but flash animations for NBC television (a good chunk of all the 2d, and psuedo 2d animations/charts you see on the news are flash!).
Clearly - people who say it doesn't have a future don't know what they are talking about - all that work isn't just going disapear. Of course it wouldn't be the first time Adobe just sat there and let some other company eat their breakfast, lunch and dinner.
I don't think I printed too much stuff. When I left for school I took with an HP Laserjet m/p. When I moved out of Seattle from my lovely corporate job (layoffs are fun!) I gave the printer to my dad who gave it to the church. Still worked with its original toner cartridge;).
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Morse Code vs. Not - I too learned it at a young age (when I was in college) and passed the exam to get the license, but I honestly don't feel it should be a requirement.
You know what I've seen happen a lot lately? People learning how to do code on their own. Personally I think it was a good idea - get them hooked into the hobby, show them modes they may like - they'll pick up and keep the ones they like (and believe it or not - you don't have to force people to do morse code!) and run with it.
I've honestly seen more people pick up code as a hobby than I ever have in the past.
From what I've read actually a good chunk of messages via amateur radio were passed by hams via Cuba over vhf/uhf, but alas - that wasn't reported anywhere but various ham radio blogs.
He's not kidding either - less than 30 baud...
As the article says - creating your own experience is really a key. I've done it since I was 15, and in the more active clubs - you have members who are always thinking of new things to build. One year we built a huge balloon (the kind used to float radiosonde devices) with a camera, 2 beacons (so we could locate the balloon), and a repeater - talked all over Oregon state with it all afternoon long.
There really is no limit to what you can do based on your interests in amateur radio.Want to play with satellites? Work skip all day long? Play with computers over the air (with a variety of digital protocols - including 802.11, wimax, and dstar), play with your own tv station, learn morse code, play with faxes (including weather fax from space).
There are even huge world wide games you can play called contests - with somewhat tangible prizes (usually a mention in QST - the trade magazine in the US, or a certificate) - py2el on youtube is one of the more hardcore of these contesters definitely worth checking out his channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/py2el
This feature is in the PDF specification, and in fact in the youtube video you'll notice that the trust manager warning is pretty severe "only do this if you trust the PDF" sort of thing.
To me its akin to downloading an EXE from a website with a browser and clicking the open button...
Actually in this case - foxit just runs the exe without displaying the "do you really want to open this" warning Reader gives you.
Me neither, but the sounds on the video those guys sounded like they were very up on adrenalin. Their CO eventually said stop shooting.
Blowing that van to bits where they were clearly trying to help that reporter out was no "accident" - you don't shoot at medics.
No-one here feels that the PS3 or XBOX is a threat to computing because (get this): they aren't marketed as computers. The iPad is marketed as a computer. You can even get a word processor, spreadsheet, email, calendar and powerpoint wanna be app for it called iWork.
It is unquestionably testing the waters for a more locked down device that is in fact a general purpose computer. It would not surprise me at all if this year no less - they released a cheap netbook/laptop like device (specifically with a keyboard) running the exact same OS and restrictions.
For some reason Apple keeps coming back to this notion there is serious money to be made in hardware (which explains why none of their devices come with expansion ports, and the prices on said accessories are insanely not-so-great). Google is doing to Apple with the Android OS what Microsoft did to Apple with MS-DOS and Windows - build software that runs on anything, not hardware that only runs one thing, and I for one hope that keeps Steve up at night.
One major difference is the Kindle isn't marketed as a computer - the iPad is, and to me that's a frightening future.
He's like a god who knows what we want!
Not to mention Adobe ported Quake 2 to Flash back in 2007 using the Flash C compiler and it was about as fast - considering it was the most hacked together port on earth I thought its performance was ok.
Also - Quake 2 might have run on a really fast 486 (like a 133 mhz one), but yeah it was designed for a low end Pentium with hardware acceleration.
What if the rich get richer when their companies and ventures are going down in flames as in my examples?
I try the best I can to buy American made products - or failing that products made in countries that have fair treatment of their employees, but I know for a fact you typed that message on a machine that has at least one Chinese component in it.
Even my Pegasos II (which was made in Germany) has some chips on it that were manufactured in China.
Some of the best living standards in the world are in socialist countries - most of Europe in fact ;).
The reason why the USSR failed was as you said the command economy, but also the amount of greed and corruption at the top.
The reason why our economy will fail eventually is because its what I call socialized capitalism - or in other words capitalism without risk. The second something bad happens the government will bail out people who by definition should have lost everything. For the simple reason that the rich get richer (even when things are bad) because they simply make people below them suffer. I think capitalism would work great if we actually had it.
Don't believe me? Bankers got bonuses this year - even though they lost money last year (and indeed many banks failed!). Washington Mutuals (which also failed) Alan Fishman who was CEO of the company for three weeks retired with 19 million - guess who paid for that? Consumers - that's who.
Adobe says its true:
http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/
So DRM locks my media to my device...
Code signing makes it so I can only run approved apps on my device.
Whats the difference? Both technologies lock me out of watching or running what I want on my device.
I'm hardly misrepresenting your position - you don't like Flash because its closed - I'm actually not disagreeing with that position. I think its hypocritical of you to not like Flash because its closed, but support Apple's development decisions - because they are essentially the same as Flash.
The rest of my argument just refutes what you state as fact. I simply showing that you are in fact misinformed about Flash in general - not really a strawman either.
Anything else I missed?
So its ok that Apple close everything down and make it so that you have to have a signed app (drm) to run anything on their phone, but not ok that flash is a closed format?
Also you say "a patented codec" you know Flash supports about 6 different video codecs and 6 different audio formats right?
On CPU time - the only reason it sucks cpu time on the Mac is because Apple doesn't publically document hardware acceleration for video players - essentially to do video on the Mac you have to use their slow Quicktime libs. In fact the only apps that use these secret api's are made by Apple (remember how Microsoft got a lot of flak over them being the only ones using secret tools/api's on Office to give them a competitive edge?). On my windows machine app - run of the mill Flash apps never seem to approach 10% cpu overhead in a worse case scenario. I have a 933 MHz Celeron based umpc that runs Windows XP and plays all flash apps (including hulu) just fine.
The one study that was done on the Nexus One showed that playing video on Flash 10 used about 6% of the battery resources overall.
Lab Unions ;).
Like most things the government gets involved when your activities start affecting others, and sadly - especially if you live near civilization, drive a car, own a house, work for a living or get sick - everything you do affects everyone else in one manner or another.
For me its a good way to keep my contact lists up to date. I've gotten people who have looked for me to offer me a job for instance, I've gotten into betas like google voice and star trek online.
More than anything its a whitelisted email service as well. I've never gotten a single spam message in my entire time on face book.
Its also a micro-blog, but you don't have to use that if you don't want to.
Not that you need a cmyk work-flow for print production (at least newer systems) - that's what color management is for.
What scary about products like FrameMaker (and any other Windows/Mac app that doesn't support postscript passthrough) - tons of user manuals, textbooks etc etc - its only really capable of outputting in RGB.
A lot of people (mac fans) who think Flash has no future think its only used for video. The reality is its used in a lot of television animation (a lot of tv cartoons from here and Japan use Flash), video game authoring (not just web games either - a lot of stand-alone game ui's are compiled in flash - like Starcraft 2). I know someone who does nothing but flash animations for NBC television (a good chunk of all the 2d, and psuedo 2d animations/charts you see on the news are flash!).
Clearly - people who say it doesn't have a future don't know what they are talking about - all that work isn't just going disapear. Of course it wouldn't be the first time Adobe just sat there and let some other company eat their breakfast, lunch and dinner.
I don't think I printed too much stuff. When I left for school I took with an HP Laserjet m/p. When I moved out of Seattle from my lovely corporate job (layoffs are fun!) I gave the printer to my dad who gave it to the church. Still worked with its original toner cartridge ;).